A conventional camera requires a user to carefully choose camera parameters before taking an image. Moreover, in almost every commercial camera a focal surface is approximately planar over a sensor's area. Nowadays, however, some of most important applications of commercial computational cameras are post-capture refocusing, flexible control and extension of depth of field, and synthetic aperture imaging. For any computational camera design supporting these applications, high-dimensional visual information, such as an all-in-focus (AIF) image, a depth or a light field, has to be optically encoded in a recorded sensor image and computationally decoded.
Currently available commercial computational cameras mainly include a time-of-flight (ToF) camera and a light field camera. Specifically, for the ToF camera, a three-dimensional image is obtained by continuously transmitting light pulses to a scene, receiving a light returning from an object via a sensor and measuring a flight time of the light pulses; and for the light field camera, a three-dimensional focal stack is reconstructed by acquiring a four-dimensional optical filed. Unfortunately, the ToF camera requires extensive modification of a sensor circuitry and an on-board processing, while the light field camera achieves only low resolution images.